Using data from past studies, including my own study from September of 2004, Mystery Pollster notices an important trend in electoral politics. The "Incumbent Rule," which states that lesser-known challengers will receive a larger share of undediceds than well-known incumbents, has been gradually weakening for some time. In fact, by now, it may no longer apply to elections at all. As my blogging interests have widened, I have not had the time to conduct a comprehensive look at the 2004 elections to see if it has in fact disappeared altogether, but the casual investigations I have done have strongly suggested that the incumbent rule has been all but wiped out. If true, this has important ramifications for electoral politics, including determining when incumbents are endangered, and strengthening the position of all incumbents around the country.

My theory for why this seems to be occurring is three-fold. First, incumbents are not very well known anymore, as the level of news coverage devoted to politics has shrunk considerably over the years. Second, as Mystery Pollster notes, incumbents are far more willing to go negative than they were in the past. By negatively branding their opponents from the start of a campaign season, incumbents are able to wipe out the advantage many challengers have in simply being "anyone but the incumbent." (note that this could very well be a now widespread campaign tactic incumbents have adopted in response to the Incumbent Rule). Third, in an increasingly polarized political environment, more and more voters are choosing sides in straight ticket voting. I was wrote that swing voters are becoming a myth, and while that statement was hyperbole, it was not much of one. There are fewer undecided voters, fewer voters who change their minds, and far lower independent turnout than their once was (even though there are more independents). All of this adds up to a far lower advantage for challengers among undecided voters than seen at any time in the recent past.

Mystery Pollster also advances another possibility: I think that this possibility, along with the rather ridiculous idea Michael Baronne gives in the same article, is less based on voter's mentality post-9/11 than it is on the sophisticated Republican political machinery. While that may be the media narrative Republicans want to spin, it seems far more likely to me that the real cause here, if there is one, is that now Republicans are incumbents, their powerful political machinery has been turned toward defending incumbents rather than tearing them down. This is not a tale of voter's mentalities, but rather a story about Republican electoral operations, and the willingness of the media to cover up those operations with pseudo-psychological readings of the American electorate.

Anyway, combine that cause with the three I listed above, and I think we have a good rationale for why the Incumbent Rule has all but collapsed. It is an important lesson for Democrats to keep in mind this year, that we should not be happy simply because polls show us behind but Republican incumbents are below 50%. That simply may not be good enough anymore. The only way for a challenger to feel comfortable these days might be to actually be ahead in pre-election polls.